Gallup: 58% disapprove of GOP’s handling of stimulus debate

posted at 1:50 pm on February 9, 2009 by Allahpundit

Commenters have been kicking this around in Headlines, trying to figure out how the GOP can be taking a beating when big majorities favor more tax cuts in the bill and less spending. My guess: A combination of Hopenchange fee-vah among the public and the fear that something big needs to be done soon, in whatever form. CNN’s out this morning with its own new poll showing that slim majorities support the bill — 54 percent overall and 51 percent of independents — but 76 percent approve of Obama. He got high marks on the economy in Gallup’s poll, too. If this were being sold as the Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi stimulus package, which is what it is, it’d be dead on arrival, but put the Messiah on TV warning about the end times if he doesn’t get his way and it’s just enough to eke out a majority in favor. CBS and USA Today recently found 52 and 51 percent support for the bill, respectively; after tonight’s primetime sermon, expect that to bump up to 55 or more.

People are also wondering why Rasmussen’s numbers are so much lower than everyone else’s. Read Mark Blumenthal for a theory on that. Exit question: Why do majorities support the stimulus when poll after poll shows few people expect it to have a dramatic effect? Exit answer: Because, I think, the politics of a sharp economic downturn are such that the public wants to see the government doing something even if what it’s doing is a longshot to work. That’s why Republicans like Hoover and Bush were willing to intervene to try to stem the crises that began on their respective watches. It would take a strong free-market ideologue, on the order of Reagan or Ron Paul, to resist the political pressure to act for the sake of acting. Frankly, it’s amazing that so many congressional Republicans have been able to resist.

The MSM and everyone that has been dringing the “kool-aid” have too much invested in The Empty Suit One to let him look this bad this early. We will see a full court press made to keep this thing rolling along. I have no confidence that the turncoat republicans will decide to do the right thing and sink this stinking Pork Barge.

As with anything else that goes on in this country, the people polled don’t know jack sh*t about the details of the matter being polled and just vote for/against the person. During the Bush Administration, if it was a Bush policy, it polled badly, no matter if it was good or bad on the merits. The same thing is happening in opposite fashion now. The majority of this country is a bunch of ignorant Obama cult worshipers and that is what is coming across in the polls.

From 2001-2008, if Bush wanted it, it was baaaaad. Now, if Obama wants it, it must be goooooood.

For now, the only poll that counts is the mid-term elections in 2010. The GOP has to change public opinion on how the left is deceitfully raiding the treasury. It’s like a reverse Good Samaritan. The victim needs a pint of blood, the left pulls a credit card out of the victim’s pocket, blows the limit on left wing consultants and never gets around to getting the essential item, the pint of blood.

Look, when a welfare check to people who pay no federal income tax can be repeatedly called a “tax cut” (even by most Republican politicians), and many trillions of dollars are being rapidly printed to pay for a bigger federal government, then all that conservatives can do is to stand back and let the edifice tumble. As long as we have voices and attempt to push our agenda through without the RINOesque “compromises” that many would like us to have, that’s really the only honorable thing to do.

And I will add that the polls showing the country doesn’t like the Stimulus are all bogus and BS too. Just because they went in ‘our’ favor, doesn’t make them any better. As AllahPundit stated, if people are asked about it related to Congress, they will respond one way and if they are asked about it related to President Hypocrite, they will respond another. None of the responses are based on actual knowledge of the details of the Stimulus.

It all comes down to a popularity contest. The same stimulus is popular or unpopular, based on who people see as pushing it. Tell them it’s Obama’s bill, they support it. Tell them it’s Congres, they’ll slightly oppose it. It’s all BS.

Just watch. The messiah will give his ‘America will be no more unless you support me and this brilliant bill’ speech tonight, and then the polls will show massive support the rest of the week. It’s all BS. The American public is just made up of a bunch of ignorant sheep and we’re all going to pay the price for it.

As Rush always says, the biggest problem in this country is ignorance.

Please tell me what nutjob taught you your history, it really sounds like the kind of revisionist tripe I would expect from those commies at the Weekly Standard. Most of the damn stuff that the Executive branch oversees nowadays, with its myriad of agencies, weren’t even believed to be constitutional. The war powers of the executive have been greatly expanded just in the past fifty years. Maybe if you were talking about Governors at the time of our founding you might be right.

And also your contemporary revisionist history is laughable. Bush had a Republican Congress for six of his eight years, and many of the biggest spending measures were his own initatives. Bush didn’t fight the Marxists because he and the Republican leadership were socialists themselves. Biggest expansion of government since the Great Society, more federal micromanagement of educaton, Medicare Part D, etc. I really want to know just what planet you are from. I really just think you are some paid RNC hack that posts excuses for the inexcusable.

My question? Who are the 30% of Republicans who think government is better at creating jobs than tax cuts to individuals/businesses? I guess 2/3rds of them are the 20% that voted for Obama. But they were used as evidence that the country is still center-right. Polls like this may confuse that.

If you believe this gallup poll then i got a deal for you.Just send me all your money and i,ll take of the rest.Just like Rush just said that the calls coming in to congress are a lot more than a 100 to 1 against this bill.The MSM will not report this.

My question? Who are the 30% of Republicans who think government is better at creating jobs than tax cuts to individuals/businesses? I guess 2/3rds of them are the 20% that voted for Obama. But they were used as evidence that the country is still center-right. Polls like this may confuse that.

DeathToMediaHacks on February 9, 2009 at 3:00 PM

People might call themselves Republicans but who knows what they are. The majority of people don’t know their own asses from holes in the ground when it comes to political issues, and I am not even talking about the politically misguided, just the large pool of politically ambivalent that struggle with the party identification question and basically flip a coin for the questions that follow. That’s why results can be so skewed just by changing the wording in the question, because most people “think” up their answers on the spot.

The Left continues to be busy acting out all over the media (and the internet included), writing what appear to be (literally) copied-and-pasted remarks such as calling Specter a great American and thanking him and Snowe and Collins…all of these contain the same repetetive statements, including “we have to do something now” and “we have to act now” and similar.

It is mere repetition of the Obama terms, same thing we’re hearing and reading from all Democrats in Congress…mindlessly repeated without any substantiation or details other than this urgency to jump over a cliff and take our future generations with us “because we have to”.

These are also the same people who are ever so eager to register with Gallup and participate in pushing polls.

My disappointments in the GOP are that they are not making greater influence on Specter, Snowe and Collins AND that they’re using McCain and Graham repeatedly in the media as the figures for soundbites (this does not help the Right, in other words).

The war powers of the executive have been greatly expanded just in the past fifty years.

Jefferson started a War without having congress vote on a single thing. He also bougth the Louisanna Purchase as Executive, financed the Lewis and Clark Explorations(think NASA here) as Executive, had Indians in Tenn. and Ga. forceablly removed by the State, many killed, which Andrew Jackson later took to its end. To name a few things. John Adams also, see Alien and Seditions Acts for starters.

Try this, Federalist Society debate with a Liberal Constitutional Law Professor(who beleives what you do) and a Conservative, Originalist Professor who is on my side here: Debate on FISA/Patriot Act:

And also your contemporary revisionist history is laughable. Bush had a Republican Congress for six of his eight years, and many of the biggest spending measures were his own initatives. Bush didn’t fight the Marxists because he and the Republican leadership were socialists themselves. Biggest expansion of government since the Great Society, more federal micromanagement of educaton, Medicare Part D, etc. I really want to know just what planet you are from. I really just think you are some paid RNC hack that posts excuses for the inexcusable.

I’m talking about the pork stuff.

Medicare Part D for example, he campaigned on, to get elected because it was popular and needed to beat Gore. Its also not the same as what the Dems would’ve done, since it has market forces and choice involved. The Dems want a plan where the Govt. negotiates the price…as one example.

with alot of the stuff, Pork was inserted to keep everyone in line, plus the POTUS was denied the power of the Line Item Veto by SCOTUS. Another area that is highly important to get Originalist Judges on, which the Dems went Scorch Earth on.

Right – the polls are WRONG. Kind of like the ones back in November that said that grandpa was going to lose by 7 points.

The PUMA’s are going to turn the tide!!

ha.

Vernon Hardapple on February 9, 2009 at 2:42 PM

Why do you care? You are getting exactly what you and the rest of the Obamabots are getting a fascist nation. Just what you have always dreamt of. Bush is gone…you’re life must be perfect. Yet you are still a bitter, small person, spending your time trolling websites to spew your pointless vitriol. Crawl back under your rock and celebrate all that hopey-changiness your dear leader hath wrought upon the great unwashed masses.

Why don’t I ever get polled? What are the odds of an accurate poll when only 1000 are polled?

ctmom on February 9, 2009 at 1:57 PM

I’ve been asked by Gallup to signup and participate, have always declined the offer, but/so I believe that Gallup functions by inviting individuals based upon some marketing rubrics, which I am not familiar with (where you shop, etc.).

All I know is I declined on several occasions and once lectured Gallup on not calling me ever again, after they phoned me once at an unlisted number (they said it was a computer calling numbers in my area at that time, so the unlisted nature wasn’t the issue, but I still objected).

Also in the question you linked to, it has “tax cuts for individuals and businesses or increased government funding of infrastructure improvements and other projects”.

I’d bet if you changed it to “lower income taxes for individuals [or working families] and employers or increased government spending on DOT projects” you would get the opposite result. They use words like “funding” instead of “spending” and the use of “improvements” I found rather interesting. If you just clear your head and try to feel the emotion that each word in the question evokes then you can see what result they were trying to get.

the Obamabots …you’re life must be perfect. Yet you are still a bitter, small person, spending your time trolling websites to spew your pointless vitriol.

The Obama campaign (so-called) gave a LOT of people computers and thus set off upon the public just such “trolling.” Which is still underway because Obama encourages that type of subterfuge and antisocial animosity-churning. It’s what Obama is about, it’s what he attracts and enjoys as do those he attracts.

Actually if you go down they have tax cuts for individuals and families at 51% with lowest Not Important percentage. The substitution of “businesses” for “employers” is really the main reason that the results in the initial question came out the way that they did. And then compare it to the infrastructure percentages in that exact same section, they took out the words “funding” and “improvements”.

I actually don’t think the table really disproves the original poll question. The first is a comparative one, which do you think is “most” effective in job creation. Now there are a lot of hard ideologues out there, but answering that you believe tax cuts are “most” effective or the government is “most” effective, doesn’t mean you can’t say that either is “very important” or even “necessary.” To untangle that a bit, you can think both are “very important” or necessary and still believe one works better than the other.

What I find interesting however is that people support tax cuts for individuals and NOT for businesses. That’s a really interesting distinction and it suggests that what people support is a middle/working class tax cut, not a “supply side” tax cut in the Reagan sense. Also look how well some of the other things are polling. It’s just hard to call this place a center-right country anymore.

Hmmmm, wonder what percentage even know what the GOP is? And since the public at large has been conditioned the past 8 years to dislike all things Republican, it’s not surprising to get negative marks from people who likely don’t even know what the hell is going on in the stimulus debate. They just know dopeynochange tells them Republican are bad, and that’s good enough for them.

Commenters have been kicking this around in Headlines, trying to figure out how the GOP can be taking a beating when big majorities favor more tax cuts in the bill and less spending.

The answer, I suspect, is straightforward. Your ex-wife may have a good idea, but you just don’t want to hear it from her mouth. The voice itself is grating. It’s the same with the public and the GOP. People don’t want to hear anymore from bitchin’ Republicans.

Taking a poll of the same swath who elected Obama is something akin to taking a poll of misbehaving children. They hate their parents who want to ground them (the GOP), and the favor the cool-guy uncle who’d let them go out and party (Obama and the Dems). Perhaps the parents have lost their moral authority because of their own misbehavior, but when you’re right about something, you’re, well, right. And this stimulus is just dead wrong.

Time to face the music, America. If you’re up to your eyeballs in debt of any kind, without a good excuse, tough luck. Quit whining.

If health care costs are too high, ask Obama about his buddies in the plaintiffs’ lawyer lobby and ask him about tort reform.

If college cost are too high, ask Obama about his buddies in academia who can’t seem to stop increasing tuition exponentially.

Could it be that the average person, being somewhat uninformed, is down on what the Republicans are doing about the stimulus beccause the Republicans are not stopping it or pushing through a better plan?

The average person was unaware that the Dems controlled Congress from 06 to 08. Perhaps they do not know that congressional rules are keeping Republicans from actually putting forth a better plan or voting to kill the spendulus.

limit the right to vote for federal office to those who pay the bills – i.e. only those who pay federal taxes can vote”

I would make an important amendment to that proposal: only those who pay NET federal taxes can vote. Public sector suckers at the public teet need not register, since their salary and benefits are actually negative taxes. They receive huge negative tax payments (in the form of their compensation) some small amount of which is then paid back to the government in April.

Nope: only those working in the private sector should be able to vote.

The polls are down on the GOP, no doubt. I actually think Pence and McCain did a pretty fair job of laying their case out yesterday on MTP and whatever the other show was. McCain is asked to come on by the media b/c he is who THEY want.

As far as Republicans coming up w/a cogent plan of their own, they have: tax cuts, infrastructure spending, unemployment assistance, capital gains cuts, etc. But it will never even see the light of day b/c they are out of power. Hammering this bill is the only thing they can do. And they need to keep bringing up all the new porky discoveries every minute they get on the air.

But it will never even see the light of day b/c they are out of power. Hammering this bill is the only thing they can do. And they need to keep bringing up all the new porky discoveries every minute they get on the air.

JAM on February 9, 2009 at 4:17 PM

Exactly. The GOP does not have the same platform as Obama. McCain can go on MTP, but the majority of Americans won’t see him. Instead they will see/hear Obama on the network/cable news pleading his case and talking up the threat of crisis.

For instance, more Democrats crossed over to vote with the GOP than the other way around.

I think that most people want something to be done, they just do not know what. And most people hear the GOP talking about killing this bill, not enough about alternatives.

And most people have no idea what it is in this bill. But look at it this way, the GOP can spend the next two years telling them. And if the economy is not going gang busters in a couple of years then the GOP can remind the voters of that as well.

I was talking to a young man today who put it like this: When a car is going into a skid, you have to go with the skid, make no sudden movements and avert a crash. If you do too much, you over correct. However, if you don’t do anything you just crash. I think that the media is still kissing Obama’s behind and they are telling people that everyone loves him and everyone supports his plan and thinks it is a good idea…and not wanting to be left out the folks say ME Too!

Keep this in mind: 70% of the American people supported the invasion of Iraq. How many of us still supported 5 years later? I did, but I am the exception.

I disagree. The Democrats created an illusion of winning and they turned that into a reality. A lot of people go with the majority. They assume the majority is right…therefore if you are always in a minority some people will just think you are a loser. It might not be fair, but it works that way.

I think the low numbers reflect the GOP’s failure to make the case. We here know the reasons why porkulus is anathema. The general population, not so much. The GOP has failed to make a case much less make a great one. They look like wishy washy obstructionists rather than intelligent principled professionals.
(cause they aren’t, but thats a whole nother problem.)

I disagree. The Democrats created an illusion of winning and they turned that into a reality. A lot of people go with the majority. They assume the majority is right…therefore if you are always in a minority some people will just think you are a loser. It might not be fair, but it works that way.

Terrye on February 9, 2009 at 6:58 PM

How do you “disagree” with me by making the same point I made? The idiot masses only have these polls to go by for determining what their views should be. If Republicans very publicly boycott the polls, the polls become useless and the pollsters go out of business.

No, if Republicans boycott the polls, most people will start to think that Republicans are a weird fringe group and go with the people they think are the majority. It only reinforces the trend away from the GOP.

I think the low numbers reflect the GOP’s failure to make the case. We here know the reasons why porkulus is anathema. The general population, not so much. The GOP has failed to make a case much less make a great one. They look like wishy washy obstructionists rather than intelligent principled professionals.
(cause they aren’t, but thats a whole nother problem.)

No, if Republicans boycott the polls, most people will start to think that Republicans are a weird fringe group and go with the people they think are the majority. It only reinforces the trend away from the GOP.

Terrye on February 9, 2009 at 7:57 PM

Not when the case is made that pollsters can only hurt conservatives and help liberals. You know that is the case. I don’t know of any Republicans who aren’t already boycotting the pollsters so it’s just as well it becomes official policy so that their polls no longer have any influence.

Oh wait, I forgot, you like to pretend you are a Republican. You love the bogus stimulus bill and think Republicans ( except for Collins, Snowe and Specter ) will hurt themselves and the Republican Party with their position in regards to the bill….but you’ll have us know that you are plenty Republican.

Why are you ashamed of being a Democrat? I mean, I would be ashamed if I was one as well, but why are you ashamed of it?

Polls can tell you how folks felt yesterday, but they can’t tell you how much Republican resistance now may play out a week, or a month or year down the road. That’s why you’re better off sticking with your principles — you can still defend ’em even when the polls are bad; you can get credit for ’em when things look good, and in between you have a chance of moving the polls instead of vice versa.